A Guardian editorial, titled “Taxing corporations: One law for them…” on 3 December:
Nearly four years have passed since the Guardian’s tax gap series, as have two since the founding of UK Uncut and one since Occupy. In different ways, each shone a spotlight on the murky world of business tax, and to some extent succeeded – though until now nobody would have called it a mainstream concern. But the tax affairs of Google itself, together with Amazon and Starbucks, are suddenly just that…
The Guardian, Tuesday 18 December:
The Guardian and [wholly-owned Amazon subsidiary] Audible today announce the launch of The Guardian Audio Edition. This hour-long weekly audio digest, created in partnership with Audible.co.uk, the UK’s largest provider of digital audiobooks, will be produced by the Guardian’s award-winning multimedia team. Each audio edition will be introduced by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland and will showcase the very best of news, culture and opinion pieces as published in the Guardian each week.
Of course, this actually says less about hypocrisy and more about the nigh-on impossibility of avoiding doing business with the companies which make up the backbone of the internet. Just as with the fact that UKUncut is hosted on Amazon’s severs, the Guardian isn’t making a decision to side with an immoral company; it is operating in an economic system fundamentally incompatible with making the sort of simple ethical stands which may have been possible in a bygone age.
As the post on By Strategy, which broke the UKUncut story, says:
First, modern supply chains, as this UKUncut example ably illustrates, are so dense it is impossible to avoid a particular company. Second, the idea of opposing consumerism by proposing ethical consumerism is problematic also. There is a huge literature on this. More often than not it moralises those who cannot afford to make these kinds of consumer choices (local bookshops, ethical eating, McDonalds versus local businesses etc) as bad, while failing to recognise, for example, stagnant wages. Finally, Amazon is neither going to be economically damaged nor morally persuaded by a boycott. Ask Nestle how effective long running boycotts are.
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The Guardian and Amazon are BFFs. But so are we all.
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